Consider it a fated end to a long and often quite complicated awards season. After winning nearly every possible precursor award for her supporting work in Jacques Audiard’s musical crime dramedy “Emilia Pérez,” star Zoe Saldaña ended her first Oscar season with the ultimate prize: her first Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress.
A teary Saldaña took the stage after being presented the award by last year’s winner, “The Holdovers” star Da’Vine Joy Randolph, shouting out to her mother and entire family who were in the audience (she issued another big, quite sweet shoutout to her husband, filmmaker and producer Marco Perego-Saldaña, and his “beautiful hair,” along with their three sons, who were not in attendance).
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In her speech, Saldaña hailed the “quiet heroism and power” of characters like hers, and then made sure to highlight some of the heroes of her own life: her immigrant parents, declaring herself the “proud child of immigrant parents.” The actress, who parents emigrated from the Dominican Republic, then noted that she is “the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award,” but vowed to not be the last.
Since the film premiered at Cannes 2024, Saldaña was considered the favorite and frontrunner of the category (even after a shared Best Actress win at the festival, which also included her co-stars Selena Gomez, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Adriana Paz). At the Oscars, she beat out a strong array of other Best Supporting Actress nominees, including fellow first-timers Ariana Grande (“Wicked”), Monica Barbaro (“A Complete Unknown”), and Isabella Rossellini (“Conclave”) — plus Felicity Jones (“The Brutalist”), who’s been nominated before.
In the film, Saldana stars as pure-hearted lawyer (they do exist!) Rita, who finds herself unexpectedly involved with a local cartel lord, who asks her for assistance in obtaining gender reassignment surgery and, ultimately, a new life. Years later, Rita meets the eponymous Emilia Pérez (fellow nominee Gascón), and is shocked to see how much she has changed. Soon, Rita joins Emilia in her quest to find a modicum of forgiveness in the very world she previously ruled with an iron fist. Plus: singing and dancing!
Over the many months of awards season, Saldana picked up an enviable stack of hardware for her work in the Netflix film, including a BAFTA, a Critics Choice Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award, along with numerous accolades from festivals like Middleburg, SCAD, Palm Springs, and Santa Barbara, plus wins from various critics groups. In short: she was the favorite, and she proved out.
Not that the road there was easy. Audiard’s film, initially hailed by many after its Cannes debut, ultimately proved to be divisive along the way to glory. Still, the feature walked away with 13 Oscar nominations, the most for any non-English language feature ever. (One of the songs Saldana sings in the film, “El Mal,” was also nominated for Best Song at this year’s ceremony.)
Backlash against the film’s creation, themes, language, and treatment of real-life troubles was already stirring by the time Best Actor nominee Gascon fell from grace in spectacular fashion, care of “bad tweets” and worse reactions to public outcry. Yet Saldana, who reacted swiftly to the situation, appeared to be unscathed in her Oscar journey, just as Gascon, the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for an Oscar, tumbled right out of the race.
In an interview with IndieWire earlier this year, the actress explained how Audiard’s film felt like the culmination of things she’s manifested for her career in recent years. “I just felt like, at different times, ‘I want to speak Spanish in a story.’ ‘I want to dance at some point in my life.’ ‘Oh, maybe a musical. It’d be nice to sing outside of the shower.’ But it wasn’t all one thing,” said Saldaña. “And then I just remember always watching Jacques’s work and going, ‘God, I wish a girl like me could work with a filmmaker like that.’ Because his characters have always just penetrated in such a way, and I couldn’t get over them after, for days and weeks.”
As she explained, starring in “Emilia Pérez” became a liberating experience for the actress who was best known beforehand for being a pivotal player in the ensembles of billion dollar sci-fi franchises like “Avatar,” “Star Trek,” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.” With the unconventional, operatic crime drama, “I went all in. I felt her spirit, and I felt that a lot more people were going to find themselves in Rita,” Saldaña said.
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